People tend to think exhibitions are seamless.
They’re not.
Behind every exhibition — even the smallest, most restrained one — is an invisible architecture of labour: drilling, lifting, shipping, customs clearance, framing, last-minute fixes. The audience walks into a room that feels put together and beautiful, unaware that the works may have cleared customs that very morning, or that the smell in the space has been carefully engineered to mask fresh paint.
This gap between appearance and reality is where Sosa Omorogbe lives and works.
Omorogbe is a curator, gallerist, and art advisor, and the director of 1897 Gallery. When we spoke, she was preparing to fly to Abu Dhabi for Abu Dhabi Art — excited, exhausted, grateful. The familiar routine of cultural work: intensity followed by momentum, momentum followed by more intensity.
What she does, at its core, is translation.
“I translate ideas,” she says. “I answer questions that people have — or have never even thought to have.”
For Omorogbe, curation is not decoration. It is bridge-building: between the past and the present, between Africa and the world, between artists and collectors, and between artists and audiences. It is stewardship, storytelling, and world-building, all at once.
Growing Up with Art, Not Around It
Omorogbe’s relationship with art is not abstract. It is familial.
Her mother’s family is from Benin City, traditionally bronze casters. In Edo households, she says, artifacts are not museum pieces — they are part of daily life. African art was always present, always normal.
Contemporary African art entered her consciousness later, during her final year of university, when she began noticing the prices Nigerian artists were commanding. Something was happening, and she wanted to understand it.
A trip to Italy sharpened that curiosity. Watching how Italy treats its art and historical artifacts forced a comparison: where are Nigeria’s works kept? In what condition? What role could art play in shaping cultural pride?
That trip clarified something fundamental for her: art is a vehicle — of history, culture, and memory. And stewardship matters.
Benin remains her starting point. Curatorially, intellectually, emotionally. “That’s my home in my heart,” she says.
The Reality No One Sees
The romance of art collapses quickly when logistics enter the room.
“You can have a grand idea,” Omorogbe says. “A fantastic idea. But what’s the feasibility?”
Are you really shipping a massive marble sculpture from China to Lagos? Who’s paying for that?
Curatorial decisions are never made in a vacuum. They are shaped by budgets, shipping constraints, customs timelines, physical space, and labour. The creative and the practical are inseparable.
This is the work people don’t see — and often don’t value. The installers cracking open crates. The shippers navigating impossible systems. Beyond the artists and galleries are the people without whom nothing happens: installers, shippers, fabricators. Entire industries run on invisible labour. The labour that makes beauty possible.
“If we paid more attention to the work that’s unseen,” Omorogbe says, “the world would be a much richer place.”
It’s a philosophy that extends beyond art. It’s about responsibility — to people, to history, to future generations. About recognising that beauty is rarely effortless, and never accidental.
Art, Loss, and the Question of Legacy
Three artists have been occupying Omorogbe’s mind recently.
Lorna Simpson, whose exhibition at The Met stayed with her long after she left the building. Kerry James Marshall, the first contemporary artist she ever loved — the first time she truly saw herself reflected in art. And J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, whose photographs provoke a deep reckoning with Nigeria’s past and present.
One photograph in particular lingers: a family at the beach.
It’s simple. Ordinary. And impossible now.
Public access to beaches like that no longer exists in Lagos. That photograph cannot be taken again. For Omorogbe, this loss is emblematic of larger failures — of leadership, priorities, and imagination. Of what a society chooses to protect, and what it allows to disappear.
Art doesn’t always deliver immediate economic return. But its value compounds over time. Like parks, like public space, like culture itself.
People need places to think. To rest. To clear their heads.
Legacy, she argues, is not abstract. It is practical. The question is simple and difficult: are you satisfied with what previous generations left you? And if not, what are you building instead?
